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Today, Finnish is one of two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish), and has been an official language of the European Union since 1995. However, the Finnish language did not have an official status in the country during the period of Swedish rule, which ended in 1809.
3 days ago · Finnish language, member of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family, spoken in Finland. Finnish did not achieve official status until 1863, and it, as well as Swedish, were designated the national languages of Finland in 1919. Learn more about the history and phonology of Finnish.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jun 5, 2019 · Finns are believed to originate from what is now Turkey, while Finnish is a Uralic language, which comes from the Ural Mountains in Russia. The oldest piece of written Finnish is a spell. Some Finnish words still in use today date back 4,000 years.
Feb 11, 2020 · The earliest written form of Finnish dates to 1450, which is surprisingly late in the game for a major language. And it wasn’t until a hundred years later that a coherent standard written form of the language was developed, combining elements of written Latin, Swedish, and German.
There are various speculative theories about the time and place of the origin of the so-called Proto-Finno-Ugrian language. According to the most common theory, Hungarian and Finnish are separated by a mere 6,000 years of separate development.
Jan 31, 2024 · The Finnish language is ultimately from a completely separate language family (Uralic) from the Scandinavians (Indo-European), and while the Nordic region today is a closely-knit group of countries, the Finns still stand out a bit from the rest.
Jan 31, 2019 · The Finnish people split off from the Proto-Uralic language group approximately 4,500 years ago, traveling west from the Ural Mountains to the south of the Gulf of Finland. There, this group split into two populations; one settled in what is now Estonia and the other moved northward to modern-day Finland.
